Like most movies slated for release in 2020, “Emma” hit an unforeseen wall as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold. The film, which stars Anya Taylor-Joy, had a limited theatrical release in late February, expanded over the next two weekends, and was doing well – until movie theaters across the country closed down. But then, with the film’s potential audience self-quarantined at home, an unexpected thing happened: fans started begging on Twitter for the movie to be released online. This made sense: the 19th Century world of ‘Emma,’ like the new world we suddenly inhabit, is one of domestic confinement and a longing for fresh outside input – the letters from Jane Fairfax that mean so much to Miss Bates, or the prospect of a Frank Churchill visit which so excites Emma herself. The socially circumscribed possibilities for physical contact — and thus the illicit thrill of the smallest touch – seems very familiar.
“It’s definitely timely,” Taylor-Joy says. “It’s been really lovely seeing the messages on Twitter, where people say ‘Thank you.’ We wanted to create a beautiful world and have a happy ending, but we couldn’t have foreseen the need for this right now. And it’s really heartening to hear that it’s made people’s lives better.”
As fans campaigned for an earlier VOD and DVD release for Emma (resulting in the Blu-ray available in late May), the cast started sharing “Emma” memes with each other on a WhatsApp group chat called “MA.” Some favorites: how Regency couple dating rituals resemble our current ritual of six-feet-apart social distancing and how Mr. Woodhouse (Bill Nighy) overreacts to every sneeze. In previous adaptations, Mr. Woodhouse has been depicted as a complete hypochondriac; here, though, director Autumn de Wilde depicts him as someone equally concerned about other people’s health (as he is in Jane Austen’s original text). This is also something that could be said of de Wilde, who constantly plied her actors with natural herbal remedies.
“It’s so above and beyond,” Taylor-Joy says, “and the sweetest, most wonderful thing to witness. If you’re feeling anxious, she’s running up to you and putting drops of lavender behind your ear to calm you down. If you said, ‘I feel a little bit under the weather,’ all of a sudden she’s providing you different teas and herbal drops. She’s a walking apothecary. To have somebody care that much about your physical being was really helpful and supportive.”
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But none of de Wilde’s balms could deal with what Taylor-Joy calls a “personality crisis” – a panic attack that made her question not only whether she should have taken on the role of Emma Woodhouse, but whether she should continue acting at all. After spending the last five years dashing between sets, doing one movie after another — sometimes with only one day off in-between projects — she woke up in a daze one day during the rehearsals for “Emma.”
“I was like, ‘Where am !? What am I doing?’ I felt I’d been picked up and put down by a hurricane in the night,” she explains. The actress started wondering about the amount of time she’d spent playing various characters as opposed to living her own life. Where did her characters – the cold-blooded teen killer Lily in “Thoroughbreds,” the imperiled Casey in M. Night Shyamalan’s “Split” and “Glass” – leave off, and where did she begin? She knew her characters’ tastes in considerable detail – she made elaborate Spotify playlists for them – but what were her own tastes?
She says she felt lukewarm about everything, “I was just like, ‘How am I supposed to play a character when I don’t know where I’ve been?’” The support of her fellow performers in “Emma” – reminding her of her amazing gift with accents and her near-photographic memory, among other things — helped her soldier on. “I was surrounded by people that I didn’t want to let down,” she says,” and it went away. It was an insane thing to put your body through, jumping from project to project. Although I would do it again in a heartbeat.”
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Her body might feel differently. During the shoot for “Emma,” she says, something “weird and witchy” happened on the day she was due to shoot a pivotal scene – the one in which Johnny Flynn’s Mr. Knightley proposes to Emma, and she suddenly gets a nosebleed. This is not an incident from Austen’s book, but the filmmakers thought it would provide some welcome humor amid the tide of earnest romance. Taylor-Joy approved of this moment – she’d had a childhood proclivity for nosebleeds herself. That was years ago, though. But then, on the day the scene was to be shot, she woke up at 4 a.m. with… a nosebleed. “I was like, ‘Okay, I’m Emma, that’s weird,’” she says. “My body is always doing weird things when I belong to a character, and I thought maybe I willed it into existence.” Then, at the very moment, the scene was being shot, with the camera fixed in a close-up on her face – blood started running out of her nose once again. “Everyone was like, ‘Should we cut? What are we supposed to do?’” Taylor-Joy says. “I was like, ‘Keep rolling! We have to get this shot!’ and screaming at Johnny, ‘Ask me to marry you!’”
“It was a magical moment,” she says. “I can’t explain it, but I’m really grateful for it.”
Taylor-Joy’s instinct to keep rolling is partly due to her broadened interest to become a filmmaker herself. For years, she’s been shadowing her directors in an effort to learn how to become one, starting with Shyamalan on the 2019 film, “Glass.” “He was the first one to go, ‘Why won’t you sit behind me while I direct this scene, and then we can discuss it?’” she says. “I kind of caught the bug there. Directing is a lot of problem-solving, and I really enjoy that. I enjoy figuring out how something works, how you can get a shot. That turns on my brain and gives me a thrill.”
On “Emma,” she noted the attention de Wilde paid to the use of color. “I grew up a tomboy,” Taylor-Joy says. “And it wasn’t that I wasn’t interested in beauty, but I just wasn’t aware, you know? But since I’ve worked with Autumn, I’ve learned how color and fabric can tell a story, and how to pull together an entire image to progress the storyline. With ‘Emma,’ things like how tightly her ringlets are curled and when they start to relax, or when her clothes start to lose some of that structure, that’s part of the story that you can follow.”
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One day after wrapping “Emma,” Taylor-Joy was on the move again, this time joining the production of Edgar Wright’s “Last Night in Soho” (now slated to come out in April 2021). This turned into another directing tutorial. “You have a conversation with Edgar and you leave with a list of ten movies that you hadn’t heard of before,” she says. “Then you watch those movies, and you go, ‘Okay, I understand,’ because a lot of his films directly reference something he really loves. But he makes it his own. That’s something I aspire to because it’s wonderful to pay tribute to the things that you love in your own way.”
During her quarantine time, Taylor-Joy has been catching up on the films and TV she missed while working. She volunteers that it can be “quite annoying” to sit and watch things with her. “I’ll be like, ‘What kind of camera did they shoot that on?! How did they do that?’” Of particular interest was the HBO mini-series “Sharp Objects” (“I loved the camera work”). But there are no hints on her viewing checklist as to whether she’s been studying the “Mad Max” series in hopes of possibly playing a younger version of Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa – a role in which she’s rumored to be interested. All she admits is this: “I haven’t seen post-apocalyptic movies in quite a while!”
“Emma” is now available on Digital, Blu-ray, and DVD.